Background
He was born in Vienna as Theodor Tagger to an Austrian merchant and his French wife and raised in Graz.
He was born in Vienna as Theodor Tagger to an Austrian merchant and his French wife and raised in Graz.
His studies, which included German literature, music, medicine, and law, took him to Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, where under his given name, he founded in 1923 the Berlin Renaissance Theater, which he directed until 1927.
Under his original name he had already translated Pascal and the book of Psalms, edited a bimonthly journal to which the young Gottfried Benn, Alfed Dôblin, and Franz Werfel contributed, published his expressionist poetry, and was to publish the short play "Te Deum" (1929).
In 1926, however, Hamburg applauded a successful new play, "Krankheit der Jugend" (“Pains of Youth”), which painted a cynical picture of the life of disillusioned, morally confused, and corrupt postwar medical students and their girlfriends, indulging in sexual perversions, suicide, and murder. The play was written under the pseudonym Ferdinand Bruckner, his true identity remaining unknown for several years. Tagger himself turned the play down at his Berlin Renaissance Theater for being too permissive and risqué, and it had to wait for his successor to receive its Berlin premiere.
The mysterious Bruckner went on to produce another box-office hit: "Die Verbrecher" ("The Criminals,” 1928), a simultaneous portrayal of an entire, lowly residence block, containing several human stories culminating in a miscarriage of justice. It was forcefully directed in 1929 by Max Reinhardt. This was followed by "Die Kreatur" (“The Creature,” 1929), a marriage play in the vein of Strindberg. Only with the huge success of the historical drama Elizabeth of England, in 1930, which used the same impressive technique of multiple settings as Die Verbrecher to present the historical material concerning Elizabeth, Essex, and Philip of Spain in modern psychological and political terms, was it publicly disclosed that the mysterious Ferdinand Brucker was none other than Tagger himself, who had turned down his own play. No satifactory reason has been given so far for his hide-and-seek practice.
While adapting and modernizing Shakespeare’s "Timon of Athens" and Heinrich von Kleist’s "Die Marquise von O", the contemporary menace in Germany emerged to the foreground in his forceful anti-racist drama "Die Rassen" (“The Races,” 1933), depicting an academic community succumbing to racial and anti-Semitic laws.
With the rise of the Nazi regime he went into exile and spent seventeen years in America, writing scripts for Hollywood as well as historical and poetic drama, such as "Napoleon" 1936), "Heroische Komödie" (“Heroic Comedy,” 1938) about Madame de Staël, and the panoramic, two-part "Simon Bolivar" (1945).
He returned to Germany in 1951 and resettled in Berlin, where he worked as a dramaturge and resumed his playwrit¬ing. His later dramatic work includes verse plays hiding classical themes behind modern plots, such as "Der Tod einer Puppe" (“The Death of a Doll,” 1956) and "Der Kampf mit dem Engel" (“The Struggle with the Angel,” 1957).
Much of Bruckner’s drama is about the battle of the sexes. In the juxtaposition of the male and female worlds, the females turn out to be the more thoroughly genuine explorers of life, while most males are careless egocentrics. Bruckner’s interests range from psychopathology and legal injustice to modern reading of historical characters, his plots always stressing his concern with ethical and moral problems.
Of more than fifteen plays the most widely translated and produced was "Elizabeth of England" (1931); among the others translated were "Pains of Youth", (1989) and "The Races" (1944).